Angela,
About the taurine, I had checked the pre-made bag and it indicated tauring was included. If I feed pre-made ground, is what is included enough? Or supplement on top of it as well? What about salmon oil?

Thanks!

Kristi mentioned buying a meat grinder and grinding your own meat. My reply was that if you plan to do this then you need to add taurine. Especially if you store the food for any length of time.

Pre-made raw companies know about this and add taurine to their food. However, average-joe-raw-grinder who just grinds whole chickens for example may NOT know that taurine would be lost and must be re-added. My statement only applied if you planned to grind your cats' food yourself and feed only ground food.

From my research, which was done quite a while ago, whole, unground food contains enough taurine for cats.

If you grind your own food, you can supplement with either supplements from the health food store or whole pieces of muscle meat.

Hearts are a good source of taurine, as is meat from lamb and pork and dark chicken or turkey meat. Clams are extremely high in taurine, and oysters are very high.

As far as I know, salmon oil does not contain any taurine. Taurine is only found in muscle meat.

Here is a website that contains a chart showing how much taurine is in certain kinds of meat: http://www.wildkittycatfood.com/taurine.htm

According to this paper: http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/121/11_Suppl/S175.pdf the daily requirement of cats for taurine is about 30 mg/kg of the cats' body weight.

If it were me, I would trust the manufacturers of pre-made raw food have added enough taurine, but you should double check the amounts. Taurine is also added to cat kibble and canned.

Hope this helps!

I need to add taurine to my cats diet.What is the proper amount?

Angela,thank you for the info on the taurine. I am unable to find heart but the healthfood store does sell taurine. But if my cats eat clams,they must be willing to share.

I supplement with taurine whether I chunk up meat to put with the ground bones and meat or I grind it all.

Basically I just grind it all most of the time because they seem to do fine without the chunks in it and I have one cat who will not eat the chunks anyway. Whether I add hearts or not I add taurine. I also add B vitamins (takes a while for some cats to adjust to this), kelp, dulse, vitamin E and fish oil. When I don't add liver to my mix I put in vitamin A and D.

Puritans Pride online discount supplement store has fairly cheap supplements and sells taurine powder in capsules. They no longer carry the loose powder- I think I got that at Vitacost.
Hearts can be hard to find (there are online suppliers). Amazingly, my local grocery carries them.

I will have to get some clams to test on my cats.